Mercury Flyby 1 Options

[ugordan]

Interesting, it's just starting to show irregularities in brightness of the crescent, i.e. hints that it's not a smooth globe.

EDIT: I see Bjorn beat me to it

[volcanopele]

LOL, looks like we all had the same idea. So far I could only identify one surface feature when comparing the image to the Mariner 10 basemaps:

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[tedstryk]

I processed both of them now.

[climber]

Not my idea actualy, but I hope Nasa will name a yet to be discovered feature on Mercury after Hillary (& Tenzing).
BTW, did you know that when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon, it was on Hillary's 50th birthday !

[tedstryk]

Looks like our Poet Laureate has given voice to our first views from the vicinity of Mercury since the 1970s.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/poem.html

[ustrax]

HOO-RAH!!!

[n1ckdrake]

Beautiful poem. Congrats Stu!

[Stu]

Thanks! I'm almost embarrassingly chuffed that they used it. I will never cease to be amazed by how generous and enthusiastic the people behind these multi-gazillion dollar/pound/euro missions are, how they take time from their busy schedules to answer emails from space cadets like me, and put things like that poem up on their official websites. I guess I'm still just that space mad kid who sat in a corner of the library at school reading the science books during breaktimes, when everyone else was outside kicking a ball around...

[belleraphon1]

Stu.... very nice...

You give value to all of us who spent their HS lunch hours buried in books and dreaming of climbing the worldtree.

Keep it up, sir.

Craig

[nprev]

Let me add my congratulations, Stu; that's just outstanding, we're all extremely proud of you!!!

[PDP8E]

wow...ted and bjorn and others nice work.

I just finished processing the 2nd crecent shot with an adaptive filter I built a few weeks ago.

I think you can see he craters and hills especially near the terminator...enjoy!

[ElkGroveDan]

You give value to all of us who spent their HS lunch hours buried in books

What? You mean there were others? Well that's a comfort.

[tedstryk]

I can't join in there...I usually spent those hours in the office, off somewhere in the school getting in trouble, or not at school really getting in trouble.

[alan]

Jumping ahead somewhat, looking at the animation of MESSENGER's trajectory I count three obits of Mercury between flybys one and two. Does that means the flyby two will see the other side?

[elakdawalla]

Yup, flyby two is almost exactly 1.5 solar days after flyby one, so we see almost exactly the opposite hemisphere. See the little gray sidebar titled "MESSENGER's Mercury encounters" near the top of my flyby preview story for the longitudes that will be sunlit.

--Emily